Unless you have been diagnosed with cancer, or have a close friend or family member who is fighting it, you might not realize just how incredibly life-consuming it can be.
From talking with friends and loved ones who are either currently battling cancer or who have already completed their treatment, I’m always amazed time and time again just how much is involved in the whole treatment process. From scheduling any and all necessary tests, surgeries and recovery times to chemotherapy, radiation, counseling, and other aspects of treatment, it seems to me that getting well is often a full-time job not only for the patient but also for the friends and family members who are offering support.
Of course, anything that will help a cancer patient recover should be fully embraced and encouraged, even if it takes up a lot of time. But I do think that people—both the patient and their family and friends—are often surprised at just how much is involved in getting better again.
Actually, many people end up doing even more than traditional treatments to fight cancer. Going to counseling sessions or cancer support groups is a very common and helpful thing to do, as are alternative therapies like working with a nutritionist and/or naturopathic physician to look at both diet and supplements that may help, spiritual workshops and counseling, and laughter therapy.
This process of combining classic treatments for cancer (chemotherapy, etc.), with more non-traditional approaches (laughter therapy, etc.), is known as “integrative care”. It means taking any and all desired ways to battle cancer and using all of them together to help you get better. It’s an approach that I think is outstanding and I’m really glad to see that so many people are choosing to add other “attacks” in their arsenal to help successfully fight cancer.
In my opinion, the only thing that could possibly be a downside to integrative care is how to go about scheduling it without driving yourself crazy. If you have your chemotherapy in one facility, and then you meet with a naturopath in his or her office, and then later you drive to your support group downtown, and then the next day you head across town the opposite way to your laughter therapy appointment, depending on where you live you could easily pile on hundreds of miles in a given week. From everything I’ve read, keeping additional stress to an absolute minimum when fighting cancer is really important, and it just seems like going to several different facilities and clinics could be really difficult and use up a lot of time.
So while I love the idea of integrative care, I was hoping to find some places that offer this concept to their cancer patients, only all under one roof. That way you’d only have to drive to the same facility each time you had an appointment, and depending on what you had on your schedule and how you were feeling, maybe a couple of them could even be done around the same time.
I have spent some time researching both integrative care and the “one-stop shopping” method to this wonderful way of treating cancer patients, and I’m very happy to say that I’ve found some facilities that utilize this approach:
For example, here’s a facility in Indiana that offers a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional cancer treatments, all under one roof:
http://www.goshenhealth.com/main.asp?id=694
Cancer Treatment Centers of America is also using the integrative care approach:
http://www.cancercenter.com/integrative-treatment.cfm
And Boulder Community Hospital in Boulder, Colorado has a pretty decent list of alternative approaches that patients may utilize, all in the same building:
http://www.bch.org/cancer-care-services/integrative-care.aspx
My question for you is two-pronged: What do you think about the concept of integrative care? Do you believe in fighting cancer in ways other than the traditional treatments? What do you think about combining as many of these choices as possible under one roof? Do you think it will make scheduling easier as well as help to save valuable time?